Imasud ANR

Imaginary South, Imagination of the South
Legacy, memory, representation in Mediterranean

The Mediterranean as an Euro-Arab or Euro-Muslim ensemble, forces the geopolitical interpretation to take into account the localisation of a high variety of historical legacy and also to combine important power struggle of different scale, from the local conflicts to worldwide competition. The program deals with questions relating to historical memory which are at the heart of current public debates. It is certain that the social and political role of history as a transcription of the past had never before been treated with such acuteness, as we can see for instance in France where there are conflicting debates inside the historian community related to the memory ‘laws’ and the issues concerning the colonial memory. Our approach will be inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s thinking which has emphasized the narrative dimension of historical discourse by making philosophy and history interact. Based on the above problematic, our collective project will deal with two main lines of investigation.

1. ‘Places of memory’, imaginary of places in Mediterranean

a) As opposed to a common conception that one has of the inheritance place as the receptacle of an identity set rigidly in its past, we wish to draw the attention to the fact that the identification of the ‘place of memory’ is a process that is eminently built up, thanks to the recollection of the historical past, and brings creative potentiality to the place of memory itself. The place allows history to emerge and therefore generates meaning, territory, consensus but also conflict.
The research program will take into account a number of these places: archaeological sites, memorials, symbolic figures or objects. Such a typology is based in the nature of the link between the place and the group. One of the purposes of this line of enquiry will be to question the substance of the entities to which the narrations are related.

b) The attention will be drawn to situations in which places of pilgrimage and holy figures are common to different religions on the Southern and Eastern regions of the Mediterranean. Contrary to the generally accepted ideas concerning the irreducible opposition of the monotheisms in the Mediterranean, several forms of porosity seem to appear where there is a composite situation from the point of view of the religious memberships. Places and figures which produce these forms of cohabitation between Christians, Jews and Muslims seem to be endowed with an ambivalence that allows inventiveness for religious practice. Nevertheless, the interreligious cohabitation is never entirely dissociated from potentially conflicting elements. Tolerance doesn’t exclude antagonism and sharing is closely linked to competition. The interaction in “ambiguous” sanctuaries is the result of a sensitive balance between conflicting elements.

2. Memories of conflicts and conflicts of memories

If strategies of identity reconstructions are complex in period of peace, they are even more multifaceted in period of war, as identity claims become sharper. Indeed, conflicts show out through war, political assassination, terrorism, but also through rape, mutilations and other barbaric acts. Once peace is back, it is interesting to question how the different ways of living together have been maintained or can be reactivated. How populations’ movements interfere with these dynamics? The point here is to research what unexpected mechanisms allow stopping or interrupting violence. How and when violence stops being meaningful, becoming meaningless for the actors themselves? We will try to understand how the broken link is reconstructed (for instance in Algeria).
We will analyze interferences between national stories and identity memories. We will focus particularly on the Berber question that has been considered for a long time as a non-valuable object in Maghreb historiographical productions. This case study will permit to examine conflicts generated by memories’ stakes. Forms of rival historical narrations will be analyzed in Morocco and Algeria.
The nationalisation process of societies left everywhere deep marks and multiple traumas. This historical reality justifies the confrontation of unexpressed memories of Mediterranean peoples (particularly in Israel-Palestine conundrum). If one tries to understand how these identity conflicts may find a solution, this reality represents a rich field of research. Can these antagonistic memories stop preventing from peoples’ coming together? Can they even help soothing originals scars? That’s why the work of memory undertaken here and there would help evolving the meaning that each (national) community gives to its past for its present, so that this meaning may be more compatible with the neighbour’s.

Imasud includes Telemme and Idemec from Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix-en-Provence (France), CEA from Alexandria (Egypt) and CMSS from Casablanca (Morocco).

After the first evaluation and meeting of the team, Imasud has been concentrated on three topics :
Shared religious places : memories, convergences and antagonisms (Dionigi Albera)
Conflicts of memories and work of memory (Mohammed Tozy et Mohamed El Ayadi)
Heritages and construction of memory (Jean-Yves Empereur et Maryline Crivello)